The Power of Focus or The Heart of Change

The Power of Focus

Author: Jack L Canfield

Whether they are corporate professionals, budding entrepreneurs, or own a home business, most people are looking to achieve more in less time, while earning enough money to live comfortably. This book reveals the proven techniques thousands of people have used to attain all of the money they wanted while living healthy, happy and balanced lives. The Power of Focus is a practical, no-nonsense guide that shows readers how to reach their business, personal and financial goals without getting burned out in the process.

Canfield, Hansen, and Hewitt have taken the best ideas from their own successful careers (seventy-nine years of combined business expertise), and distilled them into ten powerful focusing principles. The result is a treasury of insights that is enjoyable to read and easy to understand. At the outset, the book identifies the three most important fundamentals for consistent success: developing unusual clarity; understanding that habits determine your future; and using a "no exceptions policy" approach to focus on what you want. Numerous anecdotes and inspiring stories help to reinforce each principle.

Table of Contents:

Books about: Paul Kirks Championship Barbecue or Easy Potluck Recipes

The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Author: John P Kotter

John Kotter's international bestseller Leading Change struck a powerful chord with legions of managers everywhere. It acknowledged the cynicism, pain, and fear they faced in implementing large-scale change-but also armed them with an eight-step plan of action for leaping boldly forward in a turbulent world.

Now, Kotter and coauthor Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

Based on interviews within over 100 organizations in the midst of large-scale change, The Heart of Change delivers the simple yet provocative answer to this question, forever altering the way organizations and individuals approach change. While most companies believe change happens by making people think differently, Kotter and Cohen say the key lies in making them feel differently. They introduce a new dynamic-"see-feel-change"-that fuels action by showing people potent reasons for change that spark their emotions.

Organized around the revolutionary eight-step change process introduced in Leading Change, this story-driven book shows how the best change leaders use not just reports or analysis, but gloves, video cameras, airplanes, office design, and other concrete elements to impel people toward positive action. The authors reveal how this appeal to the heart-over the mind-motivates people to overcome even daunting obstacles to change and produce breathtaking results.

For individuals in every walk of life and companies in every stage of change, this compact, no-nonsense book captures the heart-and the how-of successful change.

Author Biography: John P. Kotter, world-renowned expert on leadership at the Harvard Business School, is the author of many books, including the award-winning, best-selling Leading Change. Dan S. Cohen is a Principal with Deloitte Consulting LLC.

Publishers Weekly

"Never underestimate the power of a good story," Kotter and Cohen testify in this highly readable sequel to Kotter's groundbreaking Leading Change. Practicing what they preach, they have culled, from hundreds of interviews conducted by Deloitte Consulting, the 34 most instructive and vivid accounts of companies undergoing large-scale change. With chapters organized by each of the eight stages of change Kotter identified in his 1996 bestseller, the authors deftly contrast success stories with fumbles, then utilize the compare-and-contrast format for lively "how-to/how-not-to" discussion. Throughout, they pepper their discussion with arresting (and quotable) aphorisms, such as "Dying will not help" and "Honesty always trumps propaganda," to ensure that readers remain on task, engaged and awake. Viewed in stages with concrete examples and convenient end-of-chapter summaries, the challenges and opportunities of the change process emerge in sharp relief. Kotter and Cohen demonstrate the critical difference that focus, faith, leadership, commitment and creativity make in winning employees' hearts, offering good stories that truly apply to each topic. "The single biggest challenge in the process is changing people's behavior," they insist, while providing convincing evidence (as well as examples of the effectiveness of videos and creative visual displays) that their method of "see-feel-change" will enable a company to overcome resistance lurking in its midst. (Aug. 1) Forecast: Author appearances and a national marketing and advertising campaign will alert Leading Change's huge audience (it is HBS Press's all-time bestseller) to this practical no-nonsense guide that pumps up, orients and keeps on track companies struggling with change. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Prolific author and change management expert Kotter (emeritus, Harvard Business Sch.) and consultant Cohen join forces in this timely update to Kotter's successful Leading Change (1996), which set the standard for books on the subject. This earlier work revealed why efforts at change so often end in failure and outlined the eight critical steps needed to turn things around. Having researched more than 100 organizations in the midst of major changes, Kotter and Cohen now reveal the core problems people face at each of these eight stages and provide straightforward solutions. Their main finding is that the central issue concerns not structure or systems but changing the behavior of people. An overview of how people see and meet change is followed by chapters on the steps to successful, large-scale change, including increasing urgency, building a guiding team, getting the vision right, communicating for buy-in, empowering action, creating short-term wins, and persistence. The inclusion of many firsthand, personal stories from people involved in change efforts makes this a useful book for any organization. Highly recommended for all academic libraries supporting business curricula. Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Based on interviews within some 100 business organizations, this work explores how business leaders implement large scale change within their businesses. The book is organized around the eight stop process introduced in the author's earlier work, and contains case studies of leaders making change. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

If you have ever tried to change anything, you know how hard it is. How do you go about getting your message across to truly change people's behavior? While most companies believe change happens by making people think differently, according to John Kotter and Dan Cohen, this is not the case. Instead, the authors write that change happens when you make people feel differently.

They write that those who want to promote change must appeal more to the heart than the mind.

The authors write that people change what they do because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings. This is especially so in large-scale organizational change, where you are dealing with new technologies, cultural transformation, globalization and e-business. In an age of turbulence, when you handle this reality well, the authors explain, you win.

To understand why some organizations are leaping into the future more successfully than others, the authors write that companies first need to see the flow of effective large-scale change efforts. Change is an eight-step process that few handle well. These steps are:

1. Create a sense of urgency so that people start telling each other, "Let's go, we need to change things!" In successful change efforts, the first step is making sure sufficient people act with sufficient urgency - with on-your-toes behavior that looks for opportunities and problems and energizes colleagues, that beams a sense of "let's go." Without urgency, large-scale change will not happen.
2. Pull together a guiding team powerful enough to guide a big change. The team you put together to guide change needs a sense of urgency. When there is urgency, more people want to lead, even if there is personal risk and few short-term rewards. But urgency isn't enough. Large-scale change does not happen without a powerful guiding force. A fragmented management team cannot do the job, and a hero CEO does not work either. There are not enough hours in the day for even the strongest executive to accomplish change single-handedly. Your challenge is to put together an effective guiding team.
3. Create clear, simple, uplifting visions and sets of strategies. In successful large-scale change, a well-functioning guiding team answers the questions required to produce a clear sense of direction. What change is necessary? What is our vision for the new organization? What should not be altered? What is the best way to make the vision a reality? What change strategies are unacceptably dangerous? Good answers to these questions position an organization to leap into a better future.
4. Communicate the vision through simple, heartfelt messages sent through multiple channels so that people begin to buy into the change. In successful change efforts, the visions and change strategies can't stay locked in a room with your team. They must be communicated with as many people as possible, who in turn must buy in. The goal: to get as many people as possible acting to make the vision a reality.
5. Empower people by removing obstacles to the vision. When people begin to understand and act on a change vision, you need to remove barriers in their paths. One example: Take away a pessimistic skipper and give the crew an optimistic boss. Often the biggest obstacle to change efforts is a boss - an immediate manager or someone higher in the hierarchy. Subordinates see the vision and want to help, but are effectively shut down.
6. Create short-term wins that provide momentum. Empowered people create short-term wins -- victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without early wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous and meaningful, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.
7. Maintain momentum so that wave after wave of change is possible. After the first set of short-term wins, a change effort will have direction and momentum. In successful situations, people build on this momentum to make a vision a reality by keeping urgency up and a feeling of false pride down; by eliminating unnecessary, exhausting and demoralizing work; and by not declaring victory prematurely.
8. Make change stick by nurturing a new culture. Tradition is a powerful force. Leaps into the future can slide back into the past. Change sticks only if you create a new, supportive and strong organizational culture. A supportive culture provides roots for new ways of working. Making it stick is difficult. If this challenge isn't met at the end of the change-process, enormous effort can be wasted.

Why Soundview Likes This Book
The Heart of Change reveals a new dynamic - the "see-feel-change" dynamic that fuels action by showing people potent reasons for change that spark their emotions. Built around the eight steps of change first introduced in Kotter's bestseller, Leading Change, The Heart of Change gives straight advice on successful change - and true stories of companies making change happen. Copyright (c) 2002 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Suze Ormans Financial Guidebook or Judgment of Paris

Suze Orman's Financial Guidebook: Putting the 9 Steps to Work

Author: Suze Orman

A One-on-One Financial Planning Session with Suze Orman

With her New York Times bestseller The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, America’s leading financial expert Suze Orman transformed the concept of money forever by teaching us to recognize the emotional aspects of our relationship with it. Now, this fully revised edition of Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook translates Suze’s own brand of motivation and inspiration into a user-friendly, hands-on workbook that will empower you to work through the nuts and bolts of personal finance, with Suze as your trusted adviser.

Updated to keep you abreast of our quickly shifting economy, you’ll find:

• Insightful exercises, quizzes, and worksheets to help you understand how your parents’ relationship with money affects yours, and what money means to you

• Up-to-the-minute information on tax codes, IRA rules and regulations, and long-term-care insurance

• Useful strategies for coping with the ever-changing landscape of educational costs, social security, and the stock market

• An outline of key questions that every financial adviser should ask you upon your initial meeting

• An in-depth analysis of all your monthly expenses, providing a realistic picture of just how much money you have to work with and how you may not be respecting your money as much as you should

Regardless of your age and income, it is never too early or too late to take control of your money. Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook is the perfect companion to The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, the personal finance classic thatchanged the way millions of Americans viewed money. Full of self-tests, thought-provoking questions, and Suze’s easy-to-understand personal finance advice, here is your empowering approach to achieving financial freedom forever, with the best guide possible.

Interesting textbook: Feel Good or Is it Just a Phase

Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine

Author: George M Taber

The Paris Tasting of 1976 will forever be remembered as the landmark event that transformed the wine industry. At this legendary contest -- a blind tasting -- a panel of top French wine experts shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France's best.

George M. Taber, the only reporter present, recounts this seminal contest and its far-reaching effects, focusing on three gifted unknowns behind the winning wines: a college lecturer, a real estate lawyer, and a Yugoslavian immigrant. With unique access to the main players and a contagious passion for his subject, Taber renders this historic event and its tremendous aftershocks -- repositioning the industry and sparking a golden age for viticulture across the globe. With an eclectic cast of characters and magnificent settings, Judgment of Paris is an illuminating tale and a story of the entrepreneurial spirit of the new world conquering the old.

Publishers Weekly

In 1976, a Paris wine shop arranged a tasting as a gimmick to introduce some California wines; the judges, of course, were all French and militantly chauvinistic. Only one journalist bothered to attend, a Time correspondent, looking for a possible American angle. The story he got turned out to be a sensation. In both red and white blind tastings, an American wine won handily: a 1973 Stag's Leap cabernet and a 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay. When the story was published the following week, it stunned both the complacent French and fledgling American wine industries-and things have never been the same since. Taber, the Time man, has fashioned an entertaining, informative book around this event. Following a brisk history of the French-dominated European wine trade with a more detailed look at the less familiar American effort, he focuses on the two winning wineries, both of which provide him with lively tales of colorful amateurs and immigrants making good, partly through willingness to experiment with new techniques. While the outrage of some of the judges is funny, this is a serious business book, too, sure to be required reading for American vintners and oenophiles. Photos. Agent, Wendy Silbert. (Sept. 27) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

More has happened in the wine field in the past four decades than in the previous four centuries. The turning point in the growing, producing, and drinking of wine in California was an obscure blind tasting that took place in Paris on May 24, 1976. As the only journalist who bothered to cover the event, Taber has a distinctive take on the phenomenal growth of the wine industry. He covers much more than just the Paris tasting that judged California wines superior to France's best, chronicling the history of California wine production from its low-quality beginnings to today's huge industry. He also follows the life paths of the two California winemakers-Mike Grgich and Warren Winiarski-whose wines placed first in the 1976 Paris tasting, and he recounts the histories of the industry's chief personalities and their wineries. Elin McCoy's more engaging The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste deals with a similar time period in the wine industry; however, Taber's fact-laden book will appeal to California wine enthusiasts and others interested in the details of the 1976 Paris wine tasting. Recommended. (Index, illustrations, and maps not seen.)-Ann Weber, Bellarmine Coll. Prep. Lib., San Jose, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A vigorous account of the dare that made connoisseurs think differently about California wines-and that brought great wealth to Golden State vintners. There are doubtless those who still think that French wine means Montrachet, while California wine means Thunderbird. Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant transplanted to Paris, shared some of that prejudice, but he allowed himself to be pleasantly surprised when journalists and winemakers cajoled him to try some of the new breed of California varietals, which went far beyond what screw-top Paul Masson wines offer. Spurrier organized a blind tasting with a panel made up of France's best-known wine experts, among them the inspector general of the Appellation d'Origine Controlee Board and the editor of the Revue du Vin de France. A superb Chateau Montalena 1973 Chardonnay took top prize, grown in the rich soil of Calistoga, at great remove from the prized terroir of Burgundy or Bordeaux. Still, as Taber notes in his superb disquisition on how wines are made and who has been making them, French and American wines have been sharing tables for generations: It was American rootstock that saved the French wine industry in the 19th century, French grapes that elevated California wines above bathtub plonk. And Taber's cast of characters is a fascinatingly mixed lot, too: a Chicago classicist who took up winemaking, a Croatian refugee who helped prove that Zinfandel originated in his homeland and the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants who insisted, against the suspicions of their Protestant neighbors, that drinking wine was a good thing. The upshot: a magnificent California wine industry, and a scene much different from that of1976. Writes Taber: "The dynamic part of the world wine business today is not in Europe, but in the New World-Argentina, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States."An intoxicating indulgence for Sideways fans, and an education for would-be wine sophisticates.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
Ch. 1	The little wine shop in Cite Berryer	7
Ch. 2	France ruled the world	17
Ch. 3	The new Eden	29
Ch. 4	California dreamer	45
Ch. 5	Starting over in America	57
Ch. 6	A revolution begins	68
Ch. 7	The swashbuckling wine years	73
Ch. 8	In search of a simpler life	83
Ch. 9	An apprentice winemaker	91
Ch. 10	The rise of Robert Mondavi	100
Ch. 11	Launching a new winery	106
Ch. 12	A case of industrial-strength burnout	115
Ch. 13	The rebirth of a ghost winery	123
Ch. 14	Making the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon	131
Ch. 15	Making the 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay	142
Ch. 16	Voyages of discovery	155
Ch. 17	California wines at the tasting	165
Ch. 18	French wines at the tasting	185
Ch. 19	A stunning upset	197
Ch. 20	The buzz heard round the world	213
Ch. 21	A dream fulfilled	225
Ch. 22	The globalization of wine	230
Ch. 23	Dispatches from the international wine trade	243
Ch. 24	France revisited	275
Ch. 25	Napa Valley revisited	289
App	Scorecards for the judgment of Paris

The Millionaire Next Door or Let My People Go Surfing

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy

Author: Thomas J Stanley

The incredible national bestseller that is changing people's lives -- and increasing their net worth!

CAN YOU SPOT THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR?

Who are the rich in this country?
What do they do?
Where do they shop?
What do they drive?
How do they invest?
Where did their ancestors come from?
How did they get rich?
Can I ever become one of them?

Get the answers in The Millionaire Next Door, the never-before-told story about wealth in America. You'll be surprised at what you find out....

Forbes

The implication of The Millionaire Next Door is that nearly anybody with a steady job can amass a tidy fortune.

Library Journal

In The Millionaire Next Door, read by Cotter Smith, Stanley (Marketing to the Affluent) and Danko (marketing, SUNY at Albany) summarize findings from their research into the key characteristics that explain how the elite club of millionaires have become "wealthy." Focusing on those with a net worth of at least $1 million, their surprising results reveal fundamental qualities of this group that are diametrically opposed to today's earn-and-consume culture, including living below their means, allocating funds efficiently in ways that build wealth, ignoring conspicuous consumption, being proficient in targeting marketing opportunities, and choosing the "right" occupation. It's evident that anyone can accumulate wealth, if they are disciplined enough, determined to persevere, and have the merest of luck. In The Millionaire Mind, an excellent follow-up to the highly successful first analysis of how ordinary folks can accumulate wealth, Stanley interviews many more participants in a much more comprehensive study of the characteristics of those in this economic situation. The author structures these deeper details into categories that include the key success factors that define this group, the relationship of education to their success, their approach to balancing risk, how they located themselves in their work, their choice of spouse, how they live their daily lives, and the significant differences in the truth about this group vs. the misplaced image of high spenders. Narrator Smith's solid, dead-on reading never fails to heighten the importance of these principles that most twentysomethings should be forced to listen to in toto. Highly recommended for all public libraries. Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

New York Post

A lively account of who the richest people in the U.S. really are.

Book about: The World Is Curved or Outrage

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Author: Yvon Chouinard

and/or stickers showing their discounted price. More about bargain books

Table of Contents:

	History	5
	Philosophies	81
	Product design philosophy	85
	Production philosophy	117
	Distribution philosophy	126
	Image philosophy	147
	Financial philosophy	159
	Human resource philosophy	165
	Management philosophy	177
	Environmental philosophy	187
	1% for the planet alliance	247